In the following excerpt from her book on Proulx, Rood provides an overview of "The Half-Skinned Steer" and comments on the meaning of the vulnerability of the story's characters.

In her acknowledgments Proulx writes that the idea for writing a collection of stories set in Wyoming came from an invitation by the Nature Conservancy to contribute a story inspired by a visit to one of its preserves to an anthology of short fiction titled Off the Beaten Path (1998). The result of Proulx's visit to the Ten Sleep Preserve on the south slope of the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming was "The Half-Skinned Steer," first published in the November 1997 issue of the Atlantic Monthly and later selected by Garrison Keillor for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1998 and by John Updike for the best-selling The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999). In his introduction to that...